Artifact 4: Othello Reading Guides
The rationale for including this artifact is that it demonstrates my development of professional competencies C5 (evaluate learning), and C7 (respect student diversity). This shows development of C5 because it is an example of a formative learning tool that I created to evaluate student learning (ungraded). This was used formatively for both assessment as learning and assessment for learning. I created this extensive reading guide from scratch as a continuous activity I had students complete throughout our reading of the play, Othello. After every scene, I would ask students to write a scene breakdown with the major plot points, as well as two questions they had about the scene. They also used this guide to compile their notes.
I include this artifact to represent the development C7 (respect student diversity) here as well, because this formative tool really enabled me to see differences in student understanding, and my inclusion of this reading guide was meant to help students with IEPs who were struggling in the class. If I have not yet mentioned this, upwards of 60% of my students in some of my classes in FE3 had IEPs, which I helped update throughout the year. In order to help some students with IEPs, this reading guide was also provided as a fillable PDF for students who needed to use assistive technology, and through Google classroom, I was able to see students' working on it and provide suggestions whenever something was being misunderstood. I also held recuperation periods every single day after school and during lunch (when I did not have supervision) to help students with following the play. It provided a really handy guide to see exactly which scenes students were struggling with, and which areas in summary and writing needed development. These were always done in class after reading a scene, never given for homework, which enabled me to scaffold students through the activity when needed.
As an example of such scaffolding, we did this activity together as a class for the first two scenes before I asked students to start completing them independently. They also enabled students to reflect on what we were reading in the moment and immediately after. Students were allowed to work on these collaboratively, and for the character notes we did a group activity where each group was assigned a character to research and then had to teach the rest of the class about that character and their development over the course of the play. Students used these as study guides for their exams on the play as well. At the end of the unit, I collected them and gave bonus marks on their final exams based on the degree of completion and attention to detail.
Below, you can see two scene breakdowns completed by one of my students (name omitted).
